The last few months I’ve been working with a group who want to trek to Machu Picchu in 2019. They know where they want to go. So it’s simple to create a step by step plan to get them to their desired destination: selecting dates, working with the trekking company to develop an itinerary, booking flights, hotels and all the rest of the cool experiences they’ll have along the way. [Read more…]

When social media was first constructed there was limited marketing use. Primarily a social tool, brands knew they wanted to break in and engage with the users but they weren’t always sure how. Platforms like Twitter, in particular, were difficult to crack, thanks to their lack of functionality in the early days.

Now social media platforms have become a staple of marketing strategy and everyone uses it…which has its upside and its downside. On one hand, the sheer power of social media platforms as engagement and lead generation tools can’t be overstated. On the other, competition for user attention is pretty intense. It isn’t always easy to be seen in the crowd. [Read more…]

You just can’t argue with the statistics. We are firmly entrenched in the age of video marketing and you ignore it at your peril.

Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. (Wordstream)

If you want more eyeballs on your content a.k.a your business, then you need to promote your blog posts with video. There are a couple of ways you can do this: talking head style announcing your new blog post or a simple video trailer featuring images and quotes from your article. Both are relatively simple to create.

Let’s get one thing straight: There’s no such a thing as a duplicate content penalty which existence would confirm any Google representative. There are two possible issues associated with non-original content:

The removal of a search result based on a DMCA notice. Google is said to be receiving around 75 million DMCA-related takedown requests, so this issue is bigger than you may think. The good thing is that this option of filing a DMCA notice with Google is a way to fight content scrapers who steal your content, so it’s a useful option to have.

The loss of rankings due to the fact that there is a web page that has the same (or almost the same) content as yours, so Google decided to rank that page for the sake of variety. For the obvious reasons, Google wants to show people varied search results, so they have to choose one result out of many copies. It’s hardly a penalty, but it’s not a pleasant thing to deal with: Having to compete in search with yourself.

When you want to syndicate your content on a popular blog for the sake of authority building and referral traffic, that is the risk you are running into: You may one day find that syndicated content over ranks yours. [Read more…]

Have you ever published a blog post or status update, or video and then realized it was terrible? Maybe not the content, but the format or presentation of the content? What do you do? How do you handle it?

In the case of live video, on Facebook, for example, you may not know the video sucked until after the fact. Like the video below. I’m sharing with you to share a lesson and a point. Under normal circumstances, I would never put this video on my blog.

But when I realized that I wouldn’t normally share it, I also realized you may have experienced this too and that I could share some ways to “turn a lemon into lemonade” — to paraphrase a bit. [Read more…]